MOO! Master Of Orion Reboot Leaves Early Access

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If that seems a familiar title, it’s because our last story about sci-fi 4X remaequel Master of Orion [official site] was headlined “MOO! Master Of Orion Reboot Enters Early Access”. I thought it only right to symmetrically bookend this tale, if only to please some weird compulsive part of my brain when I look at the tag page. Sadly though, that means I have omitted two vital pieces of information from the headline 1) you get a free copy of Total Annihilation if you buy MOO 2) IT’S GOT WORF IN IT. Also Luke Skywalker but WORF.

WORF. THE DORNINATOR. How did I not know this? Any road: Master of Orion leaves early access and becomes a full release on August 25th. There’s also a near-double price Collector’s Edition which has a digital art book, soundtrack, ‘retro pixel ship skins’, a new race and copies of all three original MOOs.”

Somehow, we have not offered OPINIONS about nu-MOO during its six-month mission through early access. Blame conference season, basically, but we’ll be sure to chuck some thoughts on the full version at you post-haste. Promised is that it will both appease old hands and be accessible to newcomers, that no two games are ever the same and that we’ll get Mark Hamill and Alan Tudyk as well as cuddly old Worf.

Full release is Aug 25th, but you can grab the early access version now from Steam or GoG. If you want your free copy of seminal 1997 tiny-tank’em-up Total Annihilation, you need to link your copy of MOO to a Wargaming account. The setting for that is in the options menu, apparently.

@Bracknellexile. Tony Robinson and Danny John-Jules are not in star trek. Nor where they ever marry men on ANYTHING. The only one’s in the gif above would be. LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge (The black guy with the cool shades), Michael Dorn as Warf (The guy protesting), And last and definitely not least, Brent Spiner as Data (The pale guy).

The only compelling reason I can think of for getting that deluxe-whatever version with the previous three MoO games is if 1 & 2 run without using DosBox, like the GoG versions do (for windows, anyway). Because I bet they included 3 as a way to say “See? We DID improve the series!”

I’ve had the EA game for a while. It’s more of a lightweight space 4x than Stellaris and that’s not a bad thing.

The good: An overall polished appearance, decent UI that’s easy on the eyes, runs smoothly. Voice acting if you care about that (although it gets old pretty quick). Hands-on control over tactical combat in a realtime-with-pause way, although it could use more orders and targeting finesse. It’s pretty basic… steer around the asteroids and flank kind of stuff. Your ships are finicky to control.

The bad: The aliens are very cartoonish, which is true to MOO, but still a bit hard to take as a “serious” space 4x game. They all use the same tech tree with some minor trait differences, so there isn’t much feeling that they play differently. The espionage feature is more annoying than fun. Diplomacy and trade is present but pretty thin.

Overall I think it’s a decent game for anyone who doesn’t want something as complex as Stellaris or Distant Worlds, and also wants hands-on tactical combat at a fairly basic level.

I’ve played it on and off and it’s not much more than a graphical update of MOO 2 (so far without Antarans, but they are teased in the GNN casts’ scrolling news bar).

It really shows that space 4xes really haven’t evolved as far as the Civlikes over the years. It’s great for nostalgia and for a MOO ‘clone’ it’s closer to the original experience that similarly simplified space games like Galactic Civilizations or Endless Space, but you’re absolutely right that it’s in a different class from Distant Worlds.

The game certainly isn’t bad – it’s far better than I feared when it was first announced – and it comprehensively overcomes a perennial issue with games like GalCiv and Endless Space: their sheer lack of personality. But I feel it’s a case of being careful what you wish for – the designers were too reluctant to mess with the formula of a game from the late ’90s, and the result feels as though it somehow got stuck in development for almost 20 years.